Previous Roundtables

In 2010, W&W partners, with the leadership of Jim Levitt of the Harvard Program on Conservation Innovation, held a W&W roundtable of regional conservation finance experts focused on funding future conservation across the region. This inspired the Massachusetts legislature to establish a Massachusetts Commission on Financing Forest Conservation.

On February 13, 2012, forest and conservation leaders joined Massachusetts Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Richard K. Sullivan Jr. and state legislators at the State House in Boston to celebrate the completion of the commission’s innovative report.

Chaired by Leigh Youngblood of the Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust and staffed by Jim Levitt, the Commission’s report emphasizes four key conservation finance themes: aggregation for conservation, mitigation for conservation, compact land development, and targeted forest-based economic development.

The detailed report built on recent advances that help make Massachusetts a national leader in conservation finance, including: (1) the Patrick administration’s commitment to fund $45-50 million of land conservation annually; (2) natural resource protection zoning recently adopted by several MA towns; (3) a conservation tax credit program that provides financial incentives to landowners who donate conservation land to a municipality, the state, or a nonprofit conservation organization; and (4) a Landscape Partnership Program that funds land conservation projects that aggregate or bundle many individual parcels together into larger deals. These different efforts help advance — and were in part inspired by — the Wildlands and Woodlands vision.